SIMtone Corporation, a privately held company delivering Universal Computing, today announced the availability of its Virtual Service Platform (VSP) Service Provider Edition (SPE) v2.1.0 software. SIMtone’s VSP SPE uniquely enables service providers and telecom operators to rapidly offer and efficiently deploy consumer-grade virtual PCs and SaaS services as well as and business-grade virtual desktops and applications, with minimal up-front or ongoing capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) expenditures.

With the addition of a self-provisioning portal and services, SIMtone VSP SPE allows service providers to build, configure, manage and deliver virtual hosted services on-demand, with an unparalleled user experience and very high resource efficiency.  The new platform includes a reference subscriber portal that enables users to sign up, select and self-administer their virtual PCs, desktop and SaaS configurations. Using this portal and the new configuration, imaging and provisioning functionality, a subscriber can sign up, configure and access their Virtual PCs, enterprise desktops or SaaS applications from anywhere in seconds.  Additionally, users can power on/off their Cloud PCs and SaaS services or roll them back to an earlier version.

“Cloud computing offers carriers and service providers of all sizes a unique opportunity to improve IT management and operational efficiencies while significantly reducing costs and improving service and accessibility,” explained Kurt Ziegler, SIMtone’s Senior Executive Vice President, High Performance Computing (HPC). “With the new SIMtone VSP SPE, service providers can offer their subscribers an easy way to migrate all of their existing desktops and applications to benefit from server-side virtualization and move and optimize these services into the cloud while instantly providing secure access from anywhere using any edge device.”

SIMtone’s new VSP SPE includes a “next-generation stateful persistence” option enabling service providers to offer their subscribers an “instant on” capability without tying up resources while the user is disconnected. With this feature, users begin their next session at the exact keystroke they left from the previous one, without requiring to hold their session active while disconnected, hence reducing resource utilization, costs and power consumption.

From an administrator’s perspective, the SIMtone VSP SPE platform provides a Golden Image Repository. This capability allows users to configure “golden” images of virtual desktops or guest machines complete with choice of operating system and applications. Additionally, administrators can create an inventory of guest machines that can be provisioned from golden images. SIMtone VSP SPE provides a bulk insertion interface that automates the migration of virtual desktops services to multiple users and groups. In addition, the platform offers automated, user-activity driven, peak capacity-based VMware guest machine management and load balancing.

The SIMtone VSP SPE supports VMware ESX and provides connectivity to any combination of VMware ESX server-farms or physical servers based on Windows XP, Vista and Windows Terminal Server, and Linux hosts.

The SIMtone VSP product line is the host management component of SIMtone Corporation’s Universal Cloud Computing Platform, available in three editions:  VSP Business for small and medium enterprises, VSP Enterprise for large enterprises, and VSP Service Provider for carriers and service providers. 

SIMtone Corporation’s Universal Cloud Computing Platform is a plug-and-play, secure and massively scalable intelligent-network computing solution that allows businesses and service providers to deliver all types of applications and services hosted in any “cloud” to a broad array of existing and new devices, such as a existing PCs, mobile phones or televisions or zero-touch low cost, plug-and-play terminals. By placing intelligence in the network, SIMtone enables users to access their Cloud PCs, applications and other digital services on-demand and on-the-fly, anywhere they are, securely and at very low cost.